HIST6123 New Approaches to American History

Module Overview

From its professionalization in the late nineteenth century, the field of American history has experienced many changes. From the frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner through periods of progressive and consensus historiography, the development of perspectives that valorised ‘history from below,’ to more recent gender, cultural, Atlantic, transnational and spatial turns, the field has been constantly replenished by new angles of vision, new methods of analysis and newly accessible source materials. In the era of online archives, Wikileaks and big data, the opportunities for American historians – including those based in the UK – to conduct innovative research continue to grow. At the same time, patient forensic study and a concern for synthesis remain crucial to the task of making sense of the past. This module introduces you to some of the new approaches to American history that are available to scholars in the field, including those at Southampton, whilst also emphasizing that not every skill important to the interpretation of the American past is contained in the interface between historian and screen.

Module Details

Semester:

Semester 1

CATS points:

15

ECTS points:

7.5

Level:

Level 7

Module Lead:

Kendrick Oliver

Aims and Objectives

Module Aims

The aims of this module are to:
Introduce students to the new approaches to American history opened up by the information age.
Present students with the opportunity to experiment with such approaches .
Encourage a critical awareness of the value added by such approaches to the conventional repertoire of the American historian.

Learning Outcomes

Knowledge and Understanding

Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:

The new methods and source materials made available to American historians by the information age.

The way in which the practice and ideas of American history as a field are being shaped by such methods and sources

How such methods and source materials can be used to illuminate particular questions and controversies

Cognitive Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

Reflect on the opportunities that the information age offers for new approaches to the study of the American past

Assess the value of such approaches in the context of the full range of skills and perspectives required by the American historian

Transferable and Generic Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

Read, summarize and assess complex material

Work independently on a substantial piece of research

Write in a literate, sophisticated manner

Manage your time effectively

Subject Specific Practical Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

Explore and assess the approaches introduced in the module in discussion with your peers and tutors

Complete an assignment using some of the methods and source materials explored in the module

Syllabus

The module will begin with ‘Introduction: New approaches to American history’
The following eight weeks will typically focus on eight from the following themes):
a) Natives, non-Natives, and treaty records during the colonial period
b) Deteriorating documents, digitised letters, and Native American warfare after the American Revolution
c) ‘History from below’: slavery and the recovery of the subaltern voice
d) Life after the literary turn: postmodernism and the New Cultural History
e) Back to the sources: the decision to drop the Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
f) ‘What Do We Now Know?’: the New Cold War History
g) Finding God in all the wrong places: the sacred and the secular in American history
h) ‘Big history, little history’: towards a social history of scientific cosmology in the United States
i) No more secrets? Using leaks as primary sources on U.S. foreign policy
j) The power of the past: using active history to address current affairs
The module will conclude with ‘The continuing challenge of synthesis in writing the American past’.

Special Features

This is a flagship MA module intended to showcase the blend of traditional analytical skills, digital resources and innovative research methods practiced by the team of American historians at the University of Southampton. It will guide students through the exemplary procedures of modern scholarly enquiry: ‘hands-on’ training with large online databases and archives (how do you access sources?), in-depth interrogation of individual texts (how do you read sources?), and analytical synthesis (how do you place your sources in context?)

Learning and Teaching

Teaching and learning methods

Teaching methods include:
Weekly 2-hr seminars
Essay tutorials
Learning activities include:
Training in paleography (the reading of old handwriting)
Training in use of databases such as Papers of the War Department database, the Cold War International History Project, and Wikileaks’ US Library of Public Diplomacy archive.